H55 motherboard Product Gallery

This is the Intel reference board that came along with the processor. We'll use it for baseline performance, unfortunately for a nice overclocking session you'll need something way more spicy. In the end we switched to an eVGA P55 Classified motherboard. For generic and HTPC usage where no overclocking or tweaking is required this motherboard is quite sufficient though.

The motherboard you see here is tagged as Intel DH55TC and comes in a mATX form factor. A really nice motherboard for HTPC owners as you can observe by all the connectivity. The board comes with a x16 PCIe slot, two x1 slots and a PCI slot. This will offer plenty of configurability. Let's zoom in a little to the rear panel.

The board comes standard with six USB connectors, SUB-D, DVI and HDMI monitor connectors, Gigabit Ethernet and 5.1 analog output. Totally lacking are digital sound outputs like Coaxial or Optical TOSLINK. A much missed opportunity really - though the HDMI connector comes with multi-channel support.

When we flip the board around we spot only a 4-pin power header for the processor immediately showing lackluster support for overclocking (normally 8-pin connector). Also in this day and age we expect to see solid core chokes which is not the case.

The board comes with 4 DIMM slots supporting DDR3 memory up-to 1333 MHz. We see a nice count of six SATA-2 ports. The two outer ones when in use will however block a dual-slot graphics cards; I found out the hard way with a Radeon HD 5870. Seriously, manufacturers really need to think this stuff through better.

Other than that, the layout is perfectly fine and everything is positioned logically. As you can see, the H55 PCH is cooled passively with a small heatsink.